The northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein has a population of 2.9 million.
As a partner of eXo Platform, bimoso Consulting supported the Ministry of Social Affairs, Youth, and Family of Schleswig-Holstein in their evaluation and implementation of an internal digital knowledge management and communications platform within the ministry.
The Challenge
In recent years, Germany has been home to a large and growing number of refugees. This poses new challenges for local government bodies and officials in charge of immigration management, particularly their ability to respond to the flux of immigration-related inquiries from decentralized authorities such as districts and municipalities. Additionally, local administrations need to be able to quickly inform these decentralized authorities about changes in legislation through decrees and circulars.
The state of Schleswig-Holstein was facing these challenges. According to Sascha Martin-Duwendag, CEO at bimoso Consulting, "the state of Schleswig-Holstein did not have a central physical or digital location where all such information was gathered. All such communications were done solely via email." This meant that information was easily lost and that it was difficult for officials to keep track of whether documents were up to date. The goal was then to establish a centralized digital database to facilitate the work of department officials and department managers and to help ensure effective and secure management of assignments. Furthermore, the envisioned solution needed to enable authorities to exchange best practices among each other and dynamically build a searchable repository of shared experiences.
According to Sascha Martin-Duwendag, this was not just about uploading PDF files in a shared area. The mission was to create a platform that streamlines three envisioned pillars of the department‘s knowledge management journey:
A structured knowledge base that centralizes all official information.
An FAQ space for officials to ask technical supervisory questions and maintain a live record of the best approved answers to date.
An open community of best practices where downstream authorities can exchange information and experiences, allowing for free flow of personal knowledge from more experienced to less experienced members.
Why eXo?
An open-source, secure and GDPR-compliant platform.
The platform had to meet technical sustainability requirements. For instance , it had to be open-source-based, deployable in a local, private and secure infrastructure, and, of course, compliant with all of the ministry’s security requirements, especially in regards to data protection.
Flexible hosting
Originally, the platform was supposed to be deployed in a local on-premise server. The ministry eventually opted for eXo‘s Private Cloud Hosting offer whereby eXo hosted the platform on the ministry‘s behalf in an appropriate cloud environment supplied by a German-based hosting provider that adheres to all applicable GDPR and data privacy regulations and requirements. The ministry chose this hosting offer because it proved to be the simplest and most effective solution for them.
A comprehensive platform tailored to the needs of public administrations
The eXo knowledge management platform transcends mere storage of static knowledge and brings together all the tools necessary to foster the real-time collaborative knowledge sharing and maintenance needed by today‘s fast-paced organizations. On this platform, it's possible to create customizable workspaces and use the built-in features such as collaborative editing, publication tools, processes and workflows, tagging, versionning, notes, search, analytics, interactions and activity feeds . It's also possible to connect popular productivity services such as email, calendar and file drive services through flexible interfaces. A strong area of impact is also the eXo Platform‘s flexibility in terms of tailoring the interface to meet an organization‘s specific needs without requiring any programming or coding.
Impact
The new knowledge management platform has been well-received, with several other services in Schleswig-Holstein taking note of it and expressing interest in implementing it for them as well.
there are plans to extend the solution so that other services can benefit from it . New features could be added to further develop its possible uses.
Sascha Martin-Duwendag, CEO at bimoso Consulting
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